In this week’s article I talk about authentication as a microinteraction.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

Authentication is a necessary evil in today’s world of trust, privacy, and security. It is designed to be selectively usable. A good authentication system needs to be unusable for unwanted intruders. However, it needs to be extremely usable for the legitimate users. Poorly designed authentication systems fail in two ways: either they let in the wrong people or they make it too hard for the right people.

But authentication shouldn’t be the focal point of a users’ experience with our designs. In fact, if the person is the right person, it shouldn’t be anywhere on their radar.

Save $200 and guarantee your spot in the workshops of your choice. Register for the UX Immersion: Interactions conference, April 18–20, 2016 in San Diego. But hurry because the lowest rate of $1,975 is only good through March 31.

Your UX Immersion: Interactions registration Includes:

Your choice of two awesome daylong workshops from some of the brightest minds in UX

A full day of featured talks from all of the workshop presenters plus a brand new keynote from Jared Spool

Complete conference materials from all the workshops and featured talks

Post conference access to video recordings of the featured talks and keynote

Corporate life expects us to be experts, to know the answer to every question. We make “requirements”, which turn out to really be assumptions, but because we never call them assumptions, we never go about testing them. This is as much a social political issue as anything. The higher you are in the organization, the more you’re expected to just know the answer.

In this episode, Jared and Richard Banfield explore the role of design sprints in cultivating an environment where it is ok to say “I don’t know”. Allowing yourself to admit this, and allowing your teammates to as well, leads to greater collaboration as you explore the answers together.

Richard Banfield is joining us in San Diego, CA on April 18–20 for our UX Immersion: Interactions conference. He’s teaching a daylong workshop on facilitating collaboration across your organization bypassing the usual politics. For more information, visit uxi16.com.

In todays article I look at the communication process designers and developers follow to bring designs to life.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

Step into the Wayback Machine, Sherman, and set the dial to 1994. You’ll find me in a conference room, explaining to a room of developers and product owners (back then, we called product owners either product managers or business analysts) how we would design their new product in less than a week. The expression on their faces would be one of OMG! This dude is insane. (Though, “OMG” or “dude” wouldn’t be common parlance for at least another half decade).

We look at paper prototyping now and we think how quaint. Yet, back in 1994, it was a radical departure from established practice. In those olden days, design wasn’t done the way it is today.

If you’ve been struggling to make your case for attending UX Immersion: Interactions in San Diego, April 18–20 here’s a list of reasons for your boss to say yes:

Get proven techniques and best practices for UX designers.

Our workshop leaders are the people driving the UX industry forward.

This program is carefully curated by me to assure every attendee gets tips and tools to conquer chaos and confusion with simpler designs.

There’s no other place you can go beyond inspiration and immerse yourself in groundbreaking interaction design skills.

This conference is the best place to meet people in exactly the same boat as you are with exploring the critical edges of interaction design. Find out what works for them and tell them what works for you.

Chris will explore the importance of engaging with users at the behavioral level. He’ll explain prototyping’s role in closing the feedback loop on your designs. Leave with an understanding of how to best observe and elicit behaviors.

Dan will share his easy, practical tricks for getting unstuck, as well as simple daily practices that you can use to keep your mind energized and your creative tank full. You’ll be so inspired, you’ll want to use them all right away.

Marc will show you how to facilitate interactions between people and groups that lead to meaningful change. You’ll leave this talk feeling empowered to go back home and start your own conversational revolution.

Hagan will show you where to start, how to approach the problem, and what success looks like. You’ll get a feel for the philosophy that guides her work, the decisions she makes during the process, and the types of user research she regularly employs. You’ll go home with a whole new outlook on enterprise navigation.

Amy Jo will show you how a game designer approaches their product development and how they get to a design that their users love. From her research in how game designers think, you learn the value of refining and testing a simple, stripped down MVP (minimum viable product), long before you start adding all the fancy stuff.

Richard will show you how to stop making assumptions about your users, and figure out what they really want and need. He’ll demonstrate the value in doing fewer things better, and using features to give your users superpowers. You’ll leave his talk dying to put your new knowledge of biological design principles to work.

Every part of the organization must be infused with an understanding of great design. Jared will show you​ which path organizations take to become design-infused​ and how a centralized UX team is a stepping stone to a more UX capable organization. You never thought design strategy could be so entertainingly motivating.

Remember those “A–ha!” moments in science class when you came to understand a concept by testing it in a simple experiment? That’s what we’re talking about here. Of course, the teacher had explained the concept to you, but it was by performing the experiment that you actually learned it.

The same idea applies with tutorials. And if you follow the first three rules, this reinforcement will largely take care of itself. It could be as simple as accompanying an action demonstrated in a tutorial with a very subtle bit of visual or aural feedback.

The big problem with a mobile strategy approach is it sends a message to everyone that mobile is somehow different from the kiosk, the desktop, and the customer agent. That it requires a special team, often in their own special place, separate from everything else going on.

That’s ok at first, when teams are trying to figure out how they integrate a new technology into the overall experience equation. After all, at some point someone had to decide how the kiosks would work or what systems the customer service agents would use.

In this week’s article Rachel Nabors discusses how to appropriately use animation.

Here’s an excerpt from the article:

Sadly, animation is considered decorative by the bulk of the web development community. UI designers and interaction developers know better, of course. But when I’m teaching a workshop on animation for interaction, I know that my students face an uphill battle against decision makers who consider it nice to have, and tack it on at the end of a project, if at all.

This stigma is hard to shake. But it starts with us using animation deliberately or not at all. Poorly considered, tacked-on animation will often cause more harm than good. Users may complain that it’s too slow or too fast, or that they have no idea what just happened.

Storytelling is a powerful way to measure our understanding of our users and their experiences. But unfortunately, we don’t always get the story right. User experience rests more on listening to what the users want to tell us rather than the stories research teams and designers tell themselves within the confines of their organizations. Perhaps it’s time to first try story listening before recanting the tales.

In this episode, we hear a story from Mike Monteiro about design going wrong. Jared Spool then talks to Marc Rettig about how the team could employ a technique, the Collective Story Harvest, to take apart the problem and come to new insights. All by listening to a story.

Marc Rettig is joining us in San Diego, CA on April 18–20 for our UX Immersion: Interactions conference. He’s teaching a daylong workshop on research techniques for gaining deeper insights. For more information, visit uxi16.com.